Mind Prey

feet behind her. They were moving fast, a tight clutch of cops, the fat Franklin and the frightening Loring and the middle-aged suspect, Tower Manette trotting a few feet behind, his white hair standing up in peaks. He spotted Lucas and ran at him, his thin face white with anger, his thin-man’s wattles shaking with rage.
    “What in the hell is going on?” He turned to point at the cops with his wife. “I’m told you’re behind this…this fucking travesty of justice.”
    “Your wife has been arrested in the course of our investigation,” Lucas said coldly. “I’d suggest you shut up.”
    “We’ve got a lawyer coming,” Manette shouted. The cops were almost out of sight and Manette turned to run after them, shaking his finger at Lucas. “It’s all over for you, you…”
     
    “H E SOUNDED PLEASED,” Lester said, stepping into the hallway.
    Lucas couldn’t suppress a cop-smile, an unhappy rictus that appeared when the world had turned to shit and there was no way out. “Yeah…how about the helicopter?”
    “It’s coming; it’ll be across the street on the plaza.”
    “Excellent.”
     
    N ANCY W OLFE, DRESSED in pajamas, a housecoat, and slippers, was frightened and angry, a towering rage that expressed itself in tears and nearly incoherent screaming: “I will sue, goddamn you, goddamn you all.”
    She saw Lucas and wrenched away from Del. “You will never again,” she said, but couldn’t finish. Del had cuffed her and when he tried to lead her past Lucas, she jerked her arm away and Lucas thought she was going to come after him with her teeth. “You are, you are…” she said. Again, she failed to find the word, but a thin line of saliva dribbled out the left side of her mouth.
    “Take her down,” Lucas said to Del. “Send the pajamas to the lab.”
    “My pajamas,” she said. “My pajamas…”
    Lucas waited until they were down the stairs, and out of sight, then hurried after them. Del, Sloan, Franklin, and Loring were gathered outside the processing room. Helen Manette had already been searched, photographed, and isolated, and her clothes had been packaged for a lab inspection. She’d been given a jail smock to replace them.
    Wolfe was being photographed, and would be searched and her clothes taken away.
    And Franklin said, “Ah, man, this scares the shit outa me. This scares the shit outa me, man. Christ, I think we oughta let up.”
    “Too late,” Lucas said. “We’re already in it. If we break one of them, we’re out the other side. Now, when you get in there with them, I want them scared. We need all the pressure you can put on them: nobody gets hit, but you get your face right down in theirs, you…”
    Loring said, “Behind you…”
    Lucas turned around. Tower Manette was coming through the glass doors, an attorney in tow.
    “I want to see my wife.”
    “When we’re finished with the processing,” Lucas said.
    “We want to see her right fucking now,” Manette shouted, jostling past Sloan toward Lucas.
    “Touch another fuckin’ cop and we’ll put your ass in jail,” Lucas snapped.
    The attorney pulled Manette’s sleeve, said, “Tower, cool off.” And to Lucas: “We want to see Mrs. Manette, and we want to see her immediately. We have reason to believe that her civil rights have been grossly violated.”
    “Get a court order,” Lucas said.
    “We will,” the attorney said. “We’ll have one here in fifteen minutes.” To Manette, he said, “C’mon, Tower: this is the way to do it.”
    “You motherfucker,” Manette said to Lucas. “I met you in my house, I treated you like…like…quality, and you do this, you fuckin’…”
    “What?” Lucas asked, genuinely curious. “Fuckin’ what?”
    “Trash,” Manette said. And he was gone.
    Franklin, who had been turning the partial plate in his mouth so that his large front teeth rotated through his lips, clicked the plate back in place with his tongue, chuckled, and said, “You WASPs, he didn’t know what to call you. Wanted to call you a nigger or a spic, but you’re as white as he is.”
    “He’s gonna be black and blue if something don’t happen,” Loring said, looking back at the processing rooms. “You think they’ll get that court order?”
    “Yes, I do,” Lucas said. “That’s why you get to be like Tower Manette. So you can wake up a judge and get a pal out of jail. Now: when you get in those rooms…”
     
    W OLFE SAT IN the bare interview room, small with the bodies